About the Workshop

This one day workshop will take place at the Palais des Congrès de Montréal, Montréal, Canada as part of the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2018 (CHI 2018) on 21st April 2018. To attend the workshop, participants were required to submit a short piece of work detailing their motivations and ideas. Submissions are now closed, and accepted submissions can be seen here.

Workshop Format

This workshop aims to bring together researchers, designers and practitioners to explore an alternative, post-capitalist, “grand vision” for HCI, primarily asking what kind of futures the community sees itself as working towards. Much in the tradition of design fiction or experiential futures at CHI, all attendees at the workshop will engage in the design and prototyping of diegetic objects that help us suspend our disbelief about a future society. At the same time, the prototypes generated during the workshop will embody each other’s ideas and, in turn, facilitate presentation and discussion.

Importantly the focus of the workshop is on things not words – it is not a space to debate philosophies of post-capitalism and HCI, but a space to speculatively design technology which demonstrate these ideas.

Workshop Output

At the summation of the workshop, we intend to document all of the diegetic objects created throughout the day and form them into a zine or catalogue. Ideally we’d like to produce something like the Disobedient Electronics Zine, the TBD Catalog and/or the 3D Additivist Cookbook.

Furthermore, we are coordinating for the inclusion of diegetic prototypes as a collection within suitable venues.

Key Submission Dates

Submission: 2nd February 2018

Notification:22nd February 2018

Workshop: 21st April 2018

Grand Visions

Much future envisioning is based on the extrapolation or “projection” from the current state, where our vision of future is based on detailed knowledge of the past.

Grand visions serve as waypoints for us to work towards. Reeves et al 2016 describe these as “aiming to direct present actions in such a way as to make it come to pass”.

We are specifically interested in exploring grand visions of post-capitalist computing, in explicit contrast to what we see as a prevailing implicit vision of neoliberalism in HCI.